This disclosure relates generally to the field of fuel cells, and more particularly to quality monitoring systems and quality monitoring methods for a fuel cell manufacturing line, and a quality monitoring system for a manufacturing line.
Fuel cells are electro-chemical devices which can convert chemical energy from a fuel into electrical energy through an electro-chemical reaction of the fuel, such as hydrogen, with an oxidizer, such as oxygen contained in the atmospheric air. Fuel cell systems are being widely developed as an energy supply system because fuel cells are environmentally superior and highly efficient. As single fuel cell can only generate voltages of about 1 V, therefore, a plurality of fuel cells are usually stacked together (usually referred to as a fuel cell stack) to get a desired voltage.
Fuel cell manufacturing has a yield rate of about 90%. A fuel cell manufacturing line has multiple phases. During the multiple phases, there may be some defects in a manufactured fuel cell. These may include coating defects, debris, coating non-uniformity, incomplete coating coverage, contamination, mis-alignment of coatings, etc. At present, a human visual inspection is usually used for the defects checking in the fuel cell manufacturing line. However, the human visual inspection would depend on people's experience and knowledge to a large degree. Thus, the human visual inspection would have high requirement for operators and need a long time to train the operators well, which would cause high labor costs. Furthermore, the human visual inspection could be prone to some human errors, which could cause lack of accuracy, consistency and reliability on the fuel cell quality control. The human visual inspection has low productivity and low efficiency.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved quality monitoring solution to solve at least one of the above-mentioned issues.